The directors of Lovelace, a movie about the star of the famous porn film Deep Throat, have an opportunity to start a conversation about rape culture. Hopefully, they'll take it.

Millennium Films

The movie posters for Lovelace are out. Actress Amanda Seyfried poses in a lacy red bra, seducing the audience with bedroom eyes. She plays the lead in the forthcoming biopic chronicling the life and times of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, premiering at Sundance in a few weeks. The saga of the small town girl who partied with Hugh Hefner and Sammy Davis Jr. in the freewheeling 1970s just might be the hottest ticket in Park City. Sex, drugs, fame. Pass the popcorn. I'm in.

Related Story

But beyond the entertainment factor, the film has the potential to kickstart some serious conversations about sexual consent, possibly becoming this generation's The Accused. And in the wake of The Central Park Five, Ken Burns's nuanced documentary about the wrongful convictions of five defendants in the infamous 1989 Trisha Meili case, the moment is ripe for films that analyze sexual assault. Ideally, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman will deliver a multi-layered treatment that honors Linda's story while using it to build a bridge to the bigger issue of women's continued vulnerability to rape. Of course, this is no simple task.

Lovelace was the quintessential male fantasy of the girl next door, with wavy brown hair, average good looks, and a burning desire to perform fellatio. Deep Throat introduced a generation to the joys of kinky sex through the depiction of a woman's unabashed search for the Big O. But as I argue in my book Battling Pornography, she also ignited feminist debates about the perils of the sexual revolution. At first, some women resented her. They were suspicious that the revolution was a rip-off, designed to erode a woman's right to say no through the use of new shaming labels: frigid or prude. "Linda loves oral, what's wrong with you?" Then, after revealing that she filmed Deep Throat against her will, she became an epic cautionary tale, a reminder that the flip side of sexual pleasure for women was the constant, lurking threat of danger.

Linda died at 53 after a Denver automobile accident, but her account of sexual slavery on the set of Deep Throat is preserved in her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal. If Epstein and Friedman stay true to her story, which has always had its doubters, Lovelace will recreate a series of brutal rapes. She spoke about this at a press conference to publicize the book, flanked by anti-pornography activists Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller. Clutching a small white teddy bear with a satin ribbon around its neck, Linda described Deep Throat as a documentary of abuse engineered by her violent husband, Chuck Traynor. Stills from the film reveal massive purple bruises up and down her thighs. In 1986, Linda testified in front of Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography. "Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they're watching me being raped."

Clutching a small white teddy bear, Linda Lovelace described Deep Throat as a documentary of abuse engineered by her violent husband.

How ironic that Linda really does turn out to be the girl next door. More than 200,000 American women will be sexually assaulted this year, and like the heroine of Lovelace, many will be held responsible for their victimization. Arizona Judge Jacqueline Hatch played the blame card last September, chiding a woman who was sexually abused in a bar by an off-duty police officer: "If you wouldn't have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you."* By this logic, the 23-year-old Indian premed student gang-raped by six men on a Delhi bus just a few weeks ago invited her fate by going to a movie with a friend, rather than staying home. For more than 30 years, Linda's detractors have argued that she was a free agent who could have walked off the Deep Throat set or told someone about the abuse, ignoring Traynor's loaded gun. Others accused her of crying rape to make money from a sensational autobiography. As a society, we are invested in challenging women's assertions of sexual violation because they pose a threat to sexual freedoms that men hold dear. Aryeh Neier, a former national director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in 1980 in response to Ordeal that he worried that Linda's revelations might provide adequate legal justification for censoring pornography.

Writer Hart Williams coined a term for women who cite coercion to seek redemption for their time in the porn industry. He called it the "Linda Syndrome." Feminists have a different term: rape culture. Anti-violence educator Jackson Katz explains this concept in his book, The Macho Paradox. We live in a society where females are treated as sexual objects and sexual violence is common. Rape is accepted as a fact of life for girls and women, a nuisance that simply won't go away. Public figures like Rush Limbaugh, who hurled the epithet slut at a female law student, are part of the problem. So are BBC executives who quashed a special broadcast exposing British media personality Jimmy Savile as a serial rapist, and aired tribute programs instead.

From all reports, directors Epstein and Friedman tackle the rape question head on. The film emphasizes Traynor's brutality, which included forced acts of prostitution, gang rape, and bestiality. Actor Peter Sarsgaard reportedly turned away from the role at first, disturbed by the degree of violence he would have to portray. His character is full of menace, casting a "sinister gaze" as Seyfried basks in audience approval following a Deep Throat screening at Hef's place.

This may sound encouraging, like Lovelace will plumb their abusive relationship to shed light on the myriad ways our culture supports and condones rape. And maybe it will. But if the movie focuses solely on conflict between Linda and Chuck, it is more likely to limit our understanding. Viewers exposed to social problems framed as private problems tend to support individual-level solutions, such as putting a rapist in jail or hiding his intended victim. When social problems are linked to broader cultural conditions, like the sexual objectification of women, viewers endorse macro-level solutions such as gender discrimination education in schools.

This is a tall order for Epstein and Friedman, akin to merging director Brian Gibson's 1993 domestic violence drama What's Love Got To Do With It? with documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's 2004 indictment of the fast food industry, Super Size Me. Like Gibson, who emphasized Tina and Ike Turner's tumultuous relationship, Epstein and Friedman are assured of viewer interest in an explosive duo, Linda and Chuck. Like Spurlock, who used his one-man McDonald's eat-a-thon to shed light on the causes of the American obesity epidemic, they have the opportunity to connect the specificity of Linda's experience, including lack of education and opportunity, a naïveté that made her a perfect target for sex trafficking, and powerlessness against male violence, to systemic cultural conditions that support the global persistence of rape.

I suspect that Lovelace will be more Gibson than Spurlock, doing more harm than good. Rape victims sometimes describe the interrogation by police, hospital personnel, and the criminal courts as a second rape. I think that's how Linda would respond to the sight of Seyfried performing oral sex on a popsicle (faux penis prop) positioned between Sarsgaard's legs, and joking with Conan O'Brien on late night television about the additional "slurping noises" she recorded in the studio. Perhaps Epstein and Friedman can pull this off ethically, finding a way to tell Linda's story without contributing to her exploitation. Maybe the Sundance audience will walk away with an understanding of rape culture, rather than just adding insult to the physical and emotional injuries she sustained. That would be a nice legacy to associate with the memory of Linda Lovelace, but don't bet your lift ticket on it.

* This post originally stated that Arizona Judge Jacqueline Hatch made comments in regards to a case about rape, not sexual abuse. We regret the error.

About the Author

Carolyn Bronstein is associate professor of communication at DePaul University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project. She is the author of Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976-1986.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.